After much, much, much speculation, Microsoft let the cat out of the bag today: due to weak results, Microsoft is going to cut 5000 jobs. Those 5000 jobs will disappear over the course of 18 months, with 1400 jobs being cut immediately. Quarterly results, as well as the cost-cutting measures, were made known in a press release today.

The first to go is Performancepoint planning server, which is pissing off a lot of customers/partners. they invested lots of money into the product, and now that implementations are halfway, msft tells them they invested in a dead end. Some startups even betted their whole existence on the product...